City Cycling 2017 in Erlangen

The Helmholtz Institute for Renewable Energies joined the City Cycling Event - working together to promote cycling, climate protection and quality of life!

Copyright: S. Spoerler

City Cycling – Cycling for a better climate is a campaign by climate alliance and the aim is to foster climate protection and to promote cycling. Every year, towns, cities, communities, etc. in Germany can join this campaign and participate on 21 days in summer. As our institute is located in Erlangen and Nürnberg, we decided to join the municipality Erlangen. To join this campaign, we created our own team, named “Helmis”. Our team consists of 14 highly motivated members. The idea was, during these 21 consecutive days, to use the bike in as many routes as possible. For a few employees of the HI ERN it was in the first place not a tough competition to go by bike every day, as they are already travelling to work by bike and not by car. But now, they were more motivated to achieve an even higher result in counting kilometers, economize the carbon dioxide emission and to compete against other teams. Erlangen participated in City Cycling from 04 July to 24 July 2017. So, during this three-week period, the kilometers of each cyclist were recorded. The results of each individual team are published on the City Cycling website to enable a comparison of teams within a municipality as well as between the different municipalities.

In the end, we were surprised how many kilometers we have collected in these three weeks. In total, we achieved 3.414.8 km!! Furthermore, in this context, we were able to reduce the CO2 emission by an amount of 484.9 kg by taking the bike instead of the car.

Table with the cycling kilometers and the reducing CO2 per week and in total.

cycled

1160.5km

1092.6km

1161.7km

3 414.8 km

reduced CO2

164.8kg

155.1kg

165.0kg

484.9kg

The municipality Erlangen had overall 41 teams which joined the ‘City Cycling’ competition. In the end our team “Helmis” reached the 13th place with regard to the total kilometers. If we take a look at the relative results, which team collected the most kilometers per participant, we ended up on the 17th position.